My model of this problem is that firms cannot pay the hyper-talented what they are worth because the other employees would not stand for it. We have constructed norms whereby hyper-productive CEOs and other executives can get pay that is many times that of their employees, and still this causes massive resentment and even calls for government intervention. If programmers that were 100x as valuable as the average got even 10x the pay, the other employees would strike or riot. Equity does seem to be one way around this trap in some circumstances.
I have personal experience with this. I got [company I used to work for] to hire a very good programmer for a contract, he got the job done ahead of schedule and made us tons of money, and we couldn’t renew for another project, because other programmers found out what he was paid and threatened to quit. So he took a higher-paying job elsewhere.
Implicitly I’ve been assuming that we’re talking about tech workers here, but that may not be totally fair. I should probably extend this model to include most millenials that are highly career-focused, probably based in major coastal cities. In which case, you could probably extend this to sales/marketing and finance people as well.
I think if we do this, then it may be true that the “hyper-talented” people are still the issue here, but it could also be due to more general labor surplus issues as well. Then you get a lot of highly educated, highly motivated young people crowding into major hubs into a few high paying fields, under the belief that these are the primary, if not the only pathways to success.
Then the question becomes, is this actually true? Are they correctly identifying where their best chance at happiness lies, and it just happens that there truly are fewer opportunities for financial stability for most people these days?
If yes, then I think we could probably reduce the “slack” problem to general economic problems, but I’m not sure if that’s the direction you were intending to go with these posts. One thing I don’t know is whether or not Maya is essentially acting rationally under her incentive structures, and the incentive structures are the main culprit, or whether she is valuing certain things too highly, such as prestige and social approval.
My model says that Maya is acting the way humans react to things in similar situations, so whether or not her actions are “rational” the system is still the problem. Maya’s actions seem like they could be rational for certain utility functions, and you can’t play such games by halves (hence the lack of Slack) but my guess is that most Mayas are making a mistake playing the game at all. She should probably quit.
It does seem like financial stability is in practice much harder to achieve than it used to be, for most people. Especially when student loans and health care get involved. There’s less margin for error even with a “good” job and good jobs are harder to find in a pinch for most people. It is unclear to me how much of that is increased needs (letting consumerism, signaling and positional goods eat all your Slack, general high standards, and not putting up with boring or physically demanding work like people used to) versus how much is a real crisis (student loans, health insurance, child care and other forced expenses, lack of jobs with good pay and job security, being treated like dirt due to that, and taking of Slack in order to control people).
For programmers, especially top programmers, this isn’t an excuse. If I’m a superstar programmer who is worth 100x normal programmer, I can’t get 100x or even 10x, but I can get a new job any time I want and likely earn 1.5x with good perks. That really should be good enough to have Slack.
I like to look at energy usage per capita over time as an indicator of whether we can do more stuff than we could before. E.g. can people own cars. Technology changes this a bit, it makes cars more efficient/cheaper to make so more people can have cars. But looking at money etc makes things too easy to fudge.
So getting energy and people , the energy consumption per capita in 1980 it was 64 million BTU per person. In ~2014 it was 73 million BTU per person. So things are getting better energy wise for the globe. I won’t try to break down per country to see if things are getting better for the US, things get complicated via global trade (exporting energy consumption etc). You could expect that the majority of the increase in energy consumption has happened other places than the US (Asia had 300% energy consumption growth) during that time period though so that there might be a net negative in the US.
It is late, so I’m not going to continue. I think we have a rising inequality from various things, so even if there was an increased energy usage over all, people may feel worse off.
Or if you’re paid by results not the hour, as a contractor, you can earn the same in less time. Or even as an employee, you can just be paid to waste most of your time (though this is fairly unsatisfactory). Eg a friend of mine worked with an excellent programmer who would do nothing for months—literally spend most of the time in the pub or messing around with things that interested him—and occasionally spend a weekend programming furiously to produce what was presented to the (crappy) management as what the entire team had been working on for months.
My model of this problem is that firms cannot pay the hyper-talented what they are worth because the other employees would not stand for it. We have constructed norms whereby hyper-productive CEOs and other executives can get pay that is many times that of their employees, and still this causes massive resentment and even calls for government intervention. If programmers that were 100x as valuable as the average got even 10x the pay, the other employees would strike or riot. Equity does seem to be one way around this trap in some circumstances.
I have personal experience with this. I got [company I used to work for] to hire a very good programmer for a contract, he got the job done ahead of schedule and made us tons of money, and we couldn’t renew for another project, because other programmers found out what he was paid and threatened to quit. So he took a higher-paying job elsewhere.
Implicitly I’ve been assuming that we’re talking about tech workers here, but that may not be totally fair. I should probably extend this model to include most millenials that are highly career-focused, probably based in major coastal cities. In which case, you could probably extend this to sales/marketing and finance people as well.
I think if we do this, then it may be true that the “hyper-talented” people are still the issue here, but it could also be due to more general labor surplus issues as well. Then you get a lot of highly educated, highly motivated young people crowding into major hubs into a few high paying fields, under the belief that these are the primary, if not the only pathways to success.
Then the question becomes, is this actually true? Are they correctly identifying where their best chance at happiness lies, and it just happens that there truly are fewer opportunities for financial stability for most people these days?
If yes, then I think we could probably reduce the “slack” problem to general economic problems, but I’m not sure if that’s the direction you were intending to go with these posts. One thing I don’t know is whether or not Maya is essentially acting rationally under her incentive structures, and the incentive structures are the main culprit, or whether she is valuing certain things too highly, such as prestige and social approval.
My model says that Maya is acting the way humans react to things in similar situations, so whether or not her actions are “rational” the system is still the problem. Maya’s actions seem like they could be rational for certain utility functions, and you can’t play such games by halves (hence the lack of Slack) but my guess is that most Mayas are making a mistake playing the game at all. She should probably quit.
It does seem like financial stability is in practice much harder to achieve than it used to be, for most people. Especially when student loans and health care get involved. There’s less margin for error even with a “good” job and good jobs are harder to find in a pinch for most people. It is unclear to me how much of that is increased needs (letting consumerism, signaling and positional goods eat all your Slack, general high standards, and not putting up with boring or physically demanding work like people used to) versus how much is a real crisis (student loans, health insurance, child care and other forced expenses, lack of jobs with good pay and job security, being treated like dirt due to that, and taking of Slack in order to control people).
For programmers, especially top programmers, this isn’t an excuse. If I’m a superstar programmer who is worth 100x normal programmer, I can’t get 100x or even 10x, but I can get a new job any time I want and likely earn 1.5x with good perks. That really should be good enough to have Slack.
I like to look at energy usage per capita over time as an indicator of whether we can do more stuff than we could before. E.g. can people own cars. Technology changes this a bit, it makes cars more efficient/cheaper to make so more people can have cars. But looking at money etc makes things too easy to fudge.
So getting energy and people , the energy consumption per capita in 1980 it was 64 million BTU per person. In ~2014 it was 73 million BTU per person. So things are getting better energy wise for the globe. I won’t try to break down per country to see if things are getting better for the US, things get complicated via global trade (exporting energy consumption etc). You could expect that the majority of the increase in energy consumption has happened other places than the US (Asia had 300% energy consumption growth) during that time period though so that there might be a net negative in the US.
It is late, so I’m not going to continue. I think we have a rising inequality from various things, so even if there was an increased energy usage over all, people may feel worse off.
Or if you’re paid by results not the hour, as a contractor, you can earn the same in less time. Or even as an employee, you can just be paid to waste most of your time (though this is fairly unsatisfactory). Eg a friend of mine worked with an excellent programmer who would do nothing for months—literally spend most of the time in the pub or messing around with things that interested him—and occasionally spend a weekend programming furiously to produce what was presented to the (crappy) management as what the entire team had been working on for months.